If you want to store documents, microfilm, microfiche, movie films, or computer files, there is one place that can handle any size requirements you might have: Iron Mountain. Hidden away in the hills of rural Butler, Pennsylvania, Iron Mountain houses some of America’s most amazing, priceless treasures in a temperature-controlled and humidity-controlled underground storage facility.

This manual describes the resources available to the researcher looking for Irish ancestors in the five boroughs of New York City: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, and Staten Island. The time period is from the beginning of the 1800s to the early 1900s.

First chapters describe the history of, and contents of, the collections of city records, censuses, vital records, and what the author calls “underutilized records”:

Almshouse records: New York City provided assistance to the destitute and homeless at various almshouses located throughout the city; the Almshouse Collection begins with records in 1758.

Potter’s Field burials: also known as City Cemetery; records since 1869.

Public sector employment records: records of public sector employees, many of them Irish as a result of Tammany Society politics, from 1883 to 1968.

List of newspapers published for Irish Americans and Catholics in the 1800s.

Archaeologists working to excavate the earliest European settlement on Jamestown Island have discovered the graves of four of the men believed to have founded English America. The graves were discovered beneath what was the chancel — an area usually reserved for clergy — of the first church on the island, which stood from 1608 to 1616.

In the past few weeks, a number of people have sent email messages to me complaining they are receiving multiple email messages from this newsletter every day, sometimes two or three email messages within an hour. They usually ask me to stop that. Sadly, I have no control over that. If you also have the same problem, read on for a description of the problem and a possible solution.

I do offer a once-a-day email message service free of charge. If you would like to receive ONE EMAIL MESSAGE PER DAY containing a synopsis of all the articles published in the previous 24 hours, go to http://www.eogn.com and click on “Subscribe to the FREE Standard Edition Newsletter!” near the upper right-hand corner. A copy of that is shown to the right. That will take you to http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=948986 where you will see a subscription screen that looks like this:

A new data base identifying residents of Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady county residents who died during World War I has been added to the website of the Troy Irish Genealogy Society. To see these records, go to the TIGS website – www.troyirish.com – click on PROJECTS and then click on WORLD WAR I – NEW YORK STATE ROLL OF HONOR.

The names in this new data base were copied from a July 1, 1922 report identifying citizens of the State of New York who died while in the service of the United States during World War I. The 1922 report was compiled by Brigadier General J. Leslie Kincaid, the Adjutant General of the State of New York at that time.

Another major genealogical collection is under major and imminent threat of being lost — this time in Arizona.

Unless something changes — and fast — the Arizona State Library Genealogy Collection — a vast collection of more than 200,000 volumes, many of them irreplaceable — is about to be lost to public access.

So our help is being sought in educating Arizona officials, and particularly the Secretary of State there, as to the value of maintaining this priceless resource.

Here’s a description of this amazing collection from Daniela Moneta, former Arizona State Library Genealogy Librarian:

The Arabella Chapman Project provides two photo albums assembled by an African American woman and her family in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The pages are filled with layers of family, community, and politics. Assembled in Albany, NY and North Adams, MA — tintype, carte-de-visite, and snap shot images — Arabella Chapman’s albums tell histories both intimate and epic.

Black Americans, including Arabella’s family and neighbors, sat for and then assembled their own images, crafting counter-narratives that challenged a rising tide of racism. At the same time, in their images are a politics of pleasure. From careful sartorial choices in formal portraits to rare scenes of leisure, the Chapman albums provide us an intimate glimpse into how black Americans embodied the lived pleasure of everyday life.

The following announcement was written by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies:

LONDON, UK, July 15, 2015 —The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) held its annual conference in Jerusalem, Israel from July 6-10, 2015. Attendance peaked at 1,000 with more than 21 countries represented. More than 60 video-recorded sessions are available for on-demand viewing for those not able to be at the conference (visit www.iajgs2015.org to subscribe) and include the opening event keynote by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and Chairman of Yad Vashem, and address by Gilad Japhet, CEO of MyHeritage.

This conference is unique in the quality of resources available, the depth and diversity of experts available, the importance of making use of modern technology alongside the basics of genealogy research, and the truly international interest and cooperation. For the first time, a Family Fun Day, filled with multigenerational hands-on family history activities, was held in conjunction with the conference.

The following announcement was written by the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies:

The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) is pleased to announce the results of the election of IAJGS officers, conducted at the 35TH IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy held recently in Jerusalem, Israel.

Marlis Humphrey of Melbourne Beach, Florida, was re-elected President of the IAJGS. Marlis’s election is to a second two-year term.

Marlis brings experience in strategic planning, marketing, technology, and non-profit board governance to the IAJGS. She has led the development of a growth strategy for the IAJGS and the delivery of important new benefits and services to the association’s members. She is President of the Florida State Genealogical Society (FSGS) and recipient of the FSGS 2014 Distinguished Service Award. Marlis is a member of the JewishGen Board of Governors. She was Co-Chair of the IAJGS Boston 2013 conference. Marlis is a member and past VP Programs of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Orlando where she received a 2015 Certificate of Appreciation.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

Are you confident of the accuracy of your genealogy data? You might be amazed at how many databases I see that include mothers giving birth at the age of three, marriages at age twelve, or deaths at the age of 135. Sometimes you even find a person with a birth date prior to those of his parents. Download almost any GEDCOM file from the Internet and I suspect you can find similar problems.

Such errors are easy to create. Sometimes selecting the wrong person in original records can cause such errors. Copying someone else’s errors can cause other errors. Mistakes also occur because you had a keystroke error when entering the data; attempting to type 1835 on the keyboard can easily result in 1845 being pressed on the keys.

The U.S. news services are full of stories about Donald Trump’s campaign to become President. His stand on immigration is one of his more controversial ideas. Generally speaking, Trump seems to be against immigration. That seems surprising as his mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, was born in Scotland. His grandfather, Frederick Christ Trump, was born in Germany. His first wife Ivana was born in Czechoslovakia, his current wife Melania was born in Yugoslavia.

Despite what you learned in grade school, Christopher Columbus and his crew were not the first Europeans to land in North America. In fact, many Europeans probably preceded Columbus. Some even stayed for a while and settled in. One of the better documented European villages may be found at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

Some time around 1000 A.D., Norsemen landed on Newfoundland, where they set up a small village. Though this inhospitable spit of land would eventually come to be populated by Canadians, its original inhabitants were forgotten until one day in 1960, when an explorer, an archaeologist, and a nurse were visiting the remote community of L’Anse aux Meadows.

A worker at the Rhode Island Veteran’s Memorial Cemetery was accused of stealing more than 150 granite gravestones to pave the floor of his garage and shed, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Rhode Island and federal court documents. The worker, Kevin Maynard, 59, was charged with felony theft of government property after the Rhode Island State Police got a tip.

Maynard was arraigned in U.S. District Court on Monday, where he pleaded “not guilty.”

Family historians hungry for historic Irish records will enjoy FamilySearch’s new collection,Ireland
Petty Sessions Court Registers 1828-1912. These indexed court documents bring 22 million records to your fingertips. These records were originally filmed at the National Archives of Ireland
and the index was created byfindmypast.com. See the table below for additions to over 60 historical record collections, including 46 million US obituaries. Click on the collection’s link to start your discovery.

The San Diego Daily Transcript, which has covered local business, law and real estate for 130 years, announced Wednesday that it will cease operations next month. The final edition will be published Sept. 1, and the newspaper will close Sept. 21, publisher Robert Loomis said.

Loomis also said, “We hope a local university or library will accept the donation of our past editions and possibly even the web database so the news, data and information from the past can be a resource for future San Diego researchers and business people,” Loomis said. “It has been a great ride, one more time, our sincere thanks to our employees, and the many advertisers and subscribers who have supported us during the last 130 years.”

On Sunday, July 26 at 9PM/8PM Central, TLC will be bringing a new season of episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? with a brand new batch of celebrities ready to embark on a journey to learn more about their family history.

Sunday’s episode features Once Upon A Time’s Ginnifer Goodwin. In the episode, Goodwin knows little about her paternal grandfather’s family, and sets out to learn why her father never knew his own grandparents. What she does know is that her grandfather left home at the young age of just 11 years old. Ginnifer searches to find out why.

Yesterday I published an announcement from AncestryDNA and Calico that provides details about a new collaboration between the two organizations. In fact, the goals of the collaboration sound great: “to investigate human heredity of lifespan.” However, pessimists always see a negative side to anything and this announcement is no exception. This is a variation of the “glass is half full” versus “the glass is half empty” comparison.

Writing in Wired, Katie M. Palmer wrote an article entitled Another Personal Genetics Company Is Sharing Client Data. She states, “… companies like AncestryDNA have convinced customers to pay to give their genetic data away, at a cost of about $100 per sample. This is the same sort of bargain you make when you begrudgingly hand your personal information over to Google or Facebook: You sacrifice some amount of data about yourself in return for added convenience.”

PROVO, Utah, July 22, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Ancestry.com LLC (the “Company”), the world’s largest online family history resource, reported financial results today for the second quarter ended June 30, 2015.

Dick Eastman has been involved in genealogy for more than 30 years. He
has worked in the computer industry for more than 40 years in hardware,
software, and managerial positions. By the early 1970s, Dick was already
using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards. He
built his first home computer in 1980.

September 24 & 25, 2016 - Third International Family History Conference, Clare, Ireland

Dick Eastman LIVE at your event

Dick Eastman is available for presentations and full-day seminars at genealogy conferences around the world. Dick knows that sitting through a boring speech is painful. Therefore, he keeps things light and humorous, giving presentations that are educational, motivational, and entertaining.